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Precisely - you tell it what you want (and your constraints), and let it work out how best to do it.
Like you do with SQL, or network routing or so many other aspects.
A business software product can expect to have a lifetime of a decade - you don't know that your performance tweaks will still be applicable in 10 years time.
This is why we have so much JavaScript (and indeed java) around - raw performance has become (in most cases) a hardware and OS level concern.
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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: you tell it what you want (and your constraints), and let it work out how best to do it
Yeah - it doesn't work that way  I can't tell my compiler - "I need a function to find a cluster of similar documents under 1 s on such hardware - would you make one for me please?"
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Not as much as correctness and not at the cost of maintainability.
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In software for PC, Apps and similar (which is the biggest part of the pie currently) I fully agree with you.
But in software for rapid response electronics... performance is still a very important aspect.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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And big data wallahs demand miracles.
One place I was at was asked to process over a million DB records per second -- it was sort-of hidden/buried in the requirements, and not noticed until one of our devs sat down and calculated what the reasonable-sounding requirements really meant.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Not as much as correctness and not at the cost of maintainability.
True. But I have speeded up scientific code by a factor of 2-10 by recoding inner loops in assembly language. In at least one case, it made the difference between using slower (cheaper) and faster (more expensive) hardware for a system. In all cases, it made larger analyses feasible.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Correctness, sure. Cost of maintainability? Perhaps for a typical in-house enterprise app. If you sell software to customers they couldn't care less about your maintainability, but will switch to competitors if your performance is worse; your savings in "maintainability" will cost them in hardware and electric power.
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Also, if highly optimized parts can be incapsulated and well documented maintenability is reasonably kept. Computing intensive operations require performance, as real time operations do. I'm lucky: I have to provide real time responses following computing intensive operations.
* CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF
* GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
* Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
* I'm a puny punmaker.
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Speed of computing is the reason computers exist in the first place. So, I'll go with "yes".
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Thanks to the discovery of a new material, a cooking pan could generate enough electricity to charge a cellphone in just a few hours. The team found that a combination of the chemical elements calcium, cobalt and terbium can create an efficient, inexpensive and bio-friendly material that can generate electricity through a thermoelectric process involving heat and cold air. I love the smell of frying cellphone in the morning
I'm a little worried they insist it's 'non-toxic'.
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Sounds like metalurgists; not engineers.
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So if you and your missus wear matching rings, you're a thermocouple?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The Pwn2Own 2017 hacking contest, which celebrated its 10th anniversary, concluded after three days in which security teams hacked away at browsers and operating systems. Microsoft’s Edge seems to have been hit the hardest, while Chrome remained unhackable during the contest. On the bright side, hackers don't go after unused products
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What's to complain about?
It's still the safest ms browser ever!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Oh come on, there are literally dozens of Edge users.
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Rust, Go, and PowerShell are also gathering steam in the analyst firm's biannual language rankings For those who only code in popular languages
Yeah, I promised myself I wouldn't use these any more, but it's a slow news day. And some people like popularity contests.
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Quote: The rankings are based on a recently retweaked formula that assesses code usage in GitHub and language discussions in Stack Overflow.
So it's the buggiest, requiring more revisits than any other language, and an awful lot of people on SO bitch about how cr@ppy it is.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Pearls of wisdom for programmers collected from leading practitioners. There will be a test later
Nope, I haven't read all of them
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#2 : Apply Functional Programming Principles
um, no.
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Why on earth not?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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But when dealing with any kind of concurrency, it actually makes life considerably easier.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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#37, "Hard Work Does not Pay Off," caught my eye, immediately: [^]
«When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.» Blaise Pascal
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Hard work pays off tomorrow (eventually), laziness pays off today 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Their definition of "hard work" appears to be related solely and only to the hours spent in the workplace, which implies that they don't know what hard work is.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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